New York Times
April 6, 1958. p. 3.
Cuban rebel sympathizers ran up the red-and-black banner of Fidel Castro’s revolutionary movement on the staff reserved for Cuba at Rockefeller Plaza last night.
A holiday crowd watched about sixty demonstrators hoist the banner on the empty staff, sing the Cuban national anthem, the lower the flag and disperse.
At 8 P.M. about forty members of the same group began picketing the Waldorf Astoria Hotel at the Park Avenue entrance near Fiftieth Street. They carried placards indicating that they were under the impression that Señora Marta Fernandez de Batista, wife of Cuban President Fulgencio Batista, was at the hotel
A spokesman for the hotel said there was no record of Señora Batista’s being at the Waldorf Astoria and no reservations had been made in her name. Police said they had no knowledge that she was in the city. The picket line broke up at 9:30 P.M.
Earlier, Representative Adam Clayton Powell charged at a news conference that the State Department was ignoring his requests for information on reports that two “assassins” had been sent to New York from Cuba to abduct or kill leaders of Señor Castro’s movement here.
The Harlem Democrat said the reports had reached him through Carlos Prio Socarras, exiled former President of Cuba, who is living in Miami